Meta

Quote notes (#33)

… we think of jihad as something waged by Islam against non-Muslims, but quite often it has been between one Islamic sect and another. Now Islamists are once again declaring jihad on each other. In June the New York Times reported on an influential Sunni cleric who “has issued a fatwa, or religious decree, calling on Muslims around the world to help Syrian rebels… and labeling Hezbollah and Iran” — both Shi’ite — “enemies of Islam ‘more infidel than Jews and Christians.'” David Gardner’s Financial Times piece tells of a “conclave of Sunni clerics meeting in Cairo [that] declared a jihad against what it called a ‘declaration of war on Islam’ by the ‘Iranian regime, Hezbollah and its sectarian allies’.”

How should the West react to all this? With quiet rejoicing. Our strategic objective should be to get Islamists to expend their energies on each other rather than on us. An old aphorism says the problem with Balkans is that they produce more history than they can consume locally. Our goal should be to encourage the Muslim world to consume all its history — of which it will be producing a good deal — as locally as possible. Think of it as “farm to table” war.

All we should do, or can do, to obtain this objective is to stay out. We ought not meddle, no matter how subtly; if we do, inevitably, it will blow up in our faces. Just go home, stay home, bolt the doors (especially to refugees who will act out their jihads here) …

The goal of the TAC crowd is to use the far enemy against the near enemy (sound familiar?). To paleos, the “near enemy” is the government of whichever country they’re in (for TAC, that’ll be the US) and the far enemies (they barely even qualify as an enemy) are Islamists.

This is why some of the commentors there are engaging in sanctimonious wailing about the “cynicism” of a “disgusting article” that is “pure unadulterated evil” and “kind of disgusting”: their view is “how dare you recommend they waste their energies on each other when they could be directing their energies against our own government!”